Yesterday I wanted to wear a pair of green pants, I actually own two pairs of pants this particular shade of green and made of similar material, I actually can't tell them apart for some reason, one fits decent, and the other can't be buttoned, yesterday I attempted to put on the small pair on accident, they almost fit. Soon I'll be able to wear everything in my closet.

Monday I found out the ingredients of the ''eggs" at Subway
and McDonald’s for their breakfast sandwiches via a post by David DiSalvo on
Forbes.

"Consider the egg.
Simple, delicious, and incredibly easy to prepare. And yet, if you peruse the
nutritional listings of America's favorite fast food restaurants, quite a
different picture of the egg emerges -- and it's anything but simple. I took a
look at the published ingredient lists for six fast food mainstays that
sell"

This just underscores the importance of knowing what is in
your food, the mega corporations do not your best interest in mind, their responsibilities
are to maximize profits for their shareholders and to obey the applicable local
laws to where they operate.

Now I have a little extra incentive not to hit the snooze
button or three extra times in the morning. If I am running late, the plan is
now to hit Burger King for my egg sandwich fix, or McDonald’s for their oatmeal.
I’d rather not pay what McDonald’s charges for oatmeal, two of those and I can
get a box of Quaker, I don’t even know how much the organic stuff costs, but it
can’t be too far off from the Quaker.

Yesterday saw a slight reduction in weight, to 173.4
pounds. Body fat measured in at 19 percent body fat. Total body water was 55.5
percent.

Today's food: 2 to 3 handfuls of French fry wedges, filtered
water, 3 slices of Pizza Hut thin crust Pineapple pizza, 3 slices of their Hershey’s
desert (not that great and very sticky, plus it had a bit of the oily taste
from regular breadsticks), tall glass of Coke, bottled water.

Kacey Green

This post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.

People
in general are resistant to change, but they seem to take it to the next level
sometimes here in the Southeast. Alternative fueled vehicles, hybrids, and now
electric and range-extended electric vehicles don’t seem to get a fair shake
here.

People
seem to have some sort of idea in their heads about how things work and they
don’t care to be informed further than what they think they are. Like my Volt
people assume it’s slow, that it consumes monstrous amounts of electricity,
that it can explode into a fiery ball of flames or that it works something like
the Toyota Prius. Thankfully people try to keep an open mind when seeing the
vehicle in the flesh.

Hybrids
are slow

My
Volt turns into a hybrid when it runs out of charge; it is an electric vehicle the
other 93% of the time I’ve owned it. It can do 101 miles per hour in EV mode
with no gasoline assistance; until it burns all of the charge (I’m curious how
long it can maintain top speed on EV only). The car has more torque than many
V6 sedans (273 lb.-ft., the power to get you up to speed) and a similar amount
of horsepower (149 horsepower, the power to keep you going) to a 4 cylinder
engine. My vehicle hasn’t lost a stoplight to speed limit heat yet (closed
course do not attempt). Something I enjoy doing when leaving a stoplight is to leave
everyone behind by three or more car-lengths, and the people around here don’t
know how to conservatively take off from a stoplight, if you aren’t doing 30mph
in one car-length you get all kinds of dirty looks. I prefer to take off at 2
mph per second until I get to the speed limit when I’m driving for fuel
economy, people whip around me like I’d just cut them off when I drive like
this.

You’re
just trading a gas bill for an electric bill

The vehicle has a 16 KWh battery but it only exposes 9.7-10.2 of that for you
to use. At 110 volt charging there are more charging losses due to the thinner
cables and the increased amount of time the battery heating or cooling system
runs vs. the 240 volt charging. This equates to 8-10 hours on 110v for a full
charge vs. ~4 on 220v. At the rates I’m charged for electricity it’s about
$1.02 per charge (and I don’t often drain the battery upon arriving home) at
the rates they pay at work it’s about 75¢ to 80¢ for a full charge, again I don’t
often have a completely drained battery, but it can get pretty close. My
commute is 42 miles each way. I was spending $200 a month in gas before I got
this car, now fuel is under $40 a month.

That
car is dangerous

This
is usually based on an unrealistic test conducted on the vehicle in the lab,
about three weeks after a severe crash with a completely full battery (my
battery starts dropping the minute I leave my driveway) a test vehicle caught
fire in the scrapyard. This is similar to doing the same thing with a gasoline
powered car and leaving the tank full after a severe crash. Both cars have
approved methods to drain their fuel. The possibility of this rare situation
happening was eliminated with a fix from General Motors and verified by the
same agency that found the possibility. The two fires involving Volts in
garages were ruled by their fire marshals to not be the cars or their charging
equipment. One of those two cases involved a home-built electric car in
addition to the Volt but it was ruled out too.

I
know how a hybrid works

What’s
your point? The Volt doesn’t operate as a hybrid until the battery runs below
the usable threshold (EPA ~35 miles, for me ~50 miles) then it operates similar
to the Prius. It doesn’t often operate in a mode comparable to the Honda
hybrids or GM’s belt assisted hybrids, or GM’s E-assist system. The converted
plug-in Prius vehicles and the official Toyota-built Plug-in Prius operate much
like the original vehicle, in-fact if you dab the accelerator too hard or go
too fast the vehicle will start the engine, and the rated range is only 15
miles. The scenarios where the Volt will start the engine when the battery isn’t
empty are:

When
the user has selected mountain mode and driven past the new shortened threshold
for calling the battery empty

Finally
if you open the hood while the vehicle is energized and not in service mode

People
tend to see a car and compare it to the only two reference points they have,
how much gas their car burns (usually in the 25mpg range) or how much their
house air conditioner uses (when they set it to arctic and it runs constantly,
this actually is kind of accurate but it's more like doing this for just 1
hour, the vehicle can only hold so much of either type of fuel, electricity or
gasoline)

Kacey Green

This post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.

This morning’s weigh-in returned 174.0 pounds with 18.5%
body fat and 55.5% total body water. I think the goal of getting to 150 before
getting serious will be pretty much useless the way I’m going about things now.
As much as I loved and miss my grandpa, I don’t want his gut, so the new goal
will be to lose that and then re-evaluate. I’m curious how low the body fat can
get without becoming a gym rat, as you can see my “workouts” are under 15min
each so far, the last time I did this routine the longest was 25 minutes and
that was just trying to get all the movements correct, the following two
workouts (these come in threes before moving on to the next) were 15 or so minutes.
I know 11% will produce some nice looking abs and amateur body builders try to
keep to 8 or 9%, the number 5% stands out but I don’t remember what group has
that fat target. As a vegetarian this should be an easy enough endeavor, but I
love junk food and breads, I do need to cut most other processed foods that don’t
fit the description of bread or multivitamin tablets.

Like Spock

A good way to think of me is like Mr. Spock from Star Trek,
my emotions are there below the surface and very strong, but I often refuse to
acknowledge or show them, many times it's because I can't describe them or
perhaps I feel I'll be ridiculed or thought weak. Unfortunately, unlike Spock
there is no cool death-grip and a much shorter short-term memory. Like Spock I value
logic, truth, and enlightenment over the touchy feely stuff, particularly when someone’s
gut feeling is wrong and nor even close. That isn’t to say I don’t appreciate or
have feelings, but the other concepts of logic and truth are easier to grok.

Just like Spock, I am at my best when I embrace both my
social/emotional and my logical sides. It seems this will be a life journey,
especially since I went from being extremely shy to working with the public,
albeit in small groups at a time. Progress is being made integrating my logical,
analytical self with the side that wants to jump with joy, or weep sorrowfully.
My sense of humor taps both sides already, I love a good joke, but many
involving social situations aren’t funny to me and I need someone to explain
these jokes to me sometimes.

Alone time

After a day "socializing" I do need alone time to
regenerate (oh snap, this is like Spock's meditating) and recover. I process
much of what I see of other people’s interactions, and how to react social
situations using my analytical brain. My social brain skates trough life like a
super spoiled kid, or a kid dropped on its head with its favorite sibling or a
close friend covering for all its little mistakes.

Just like a real naïve kid, my social brain sometimes really
screws things up when its champion (the sibling or understanding friend, aka my
logical brain) has their back turned for a moment. An example is how I have
learned most questions where a female asks me about her looks are loaded, I cannot
tell which situations warrant a particular answer, and which are traps. I don’t
know when to say or not to say, “oh that looks good,” and “you don't look fat”,
so my default is not to answer and try to change the subject to more familiar
turf.

Obviously social brain tried to answer these queries once or
twice while logical brain was preoccupied with something else or logical didn't
correctly flag the questions for deeper review. So now logical brain sounds the
klaxon in these situations making me lock-up like a rusty mechanism, this prevents one type of harm while making me look very goofy rather than taking
the time to re-analyze the situation for what type of answer is required.

Why the alone time? Logical brain uses more energy. If a
typical person sits around doing math equations for hours straight, they will
want to relax by vegging or socializing. Remember anytime I am socializing, I'm
running figures and stats through my analytical brain, and if I was already
doing mentally exhausting work, hanging out with more than one or two close
friends pushes me past capacity, making me more error prone or agitated. This
is the same as if a typical person is pushed just a bit too far on those same equations,
they get angry and short with people, they make more mistakes on the task, and
if pushed far enough, they don't socialize either, naptime.

Wait, did I just describe a stereotypical geek? Yep, Aspies
are often driven to fields like research, engineering, computer science,
architecture, music, etc., though they are individuals just as varied as
typical people, but it seems easier to see Aspies in these areas than others.

Background tidbit

I didn't fit in with the normal kids and I was not truly
special-ed, I was both gifted and in need of remedial organizational skills. In
middle school, the teachers and my parents agreed it was best I just type
everything rather than deal with the hand written stuff. You can see how much
more I write with a keyboard, even the virtual keyboard on a phone.

Oh my!, this was supposed to be a quick note on the phone so I
didn't forget what I ate; I'll polish the rough edges and post this.

Testing Windows Storage Spaces

Continuing my testing
of Windows 8 Storage Spaces, I'm running a test server with Windows Server 8
Beta, after reading the post on the Building Windows 8 blog I thought it might
be useful to test.

This isn't by any
means thorough, it suits the way I'll need to use the feature on a production
server once the OS RTMs. I threw in a 3TB drive and 2 160GBdrives, and all was
fine for a while. I was using the Parity setting, at this point that mode is
incredibly slow compared to the two or three way mirrors and the simple volumes
as well. Once any drive in the pool is full the system gets incredibly
unstable, adding drives to the pool doesn't fix the problem, rotating in a
drive is also not an option yet, once I added in a pair of 500gb drives the
system got marginally more stable, for a few minutes.

My solution is to
delete the volumes and shares and use matched drives until the next public
build comes out.

Food Log

No workout today,
it's a rest day.

Breakfast was
"Moms Best"Apple oatmeal

Lunch was a foot-long
egg & cheese on honey oat with spinach, salt & pepper, and olive oil,
toasted, from Subway. Two chocolate chip cookies and a medium Coke with a
splash of Minute Maid light lemonade.

Updates with dinner
and snacks will be posted later today. (Actually posted in the next post)

Kacey Green

This post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.

Some Aspie traits

People with Asperger’s Syndrome are occasionally called
Aspies (Ahs pees), I’d long thought my intense reaction to ice cubes touching
my teeth to be indicative of sensitive teeth, but while studying Asperger’s
something that came up from time to time was intense reactions to or inability
to cope with certain textures or sensations (or visual or auditory sensations).
I think my aversion to ice cubes is due to this, that and the vibration of the
cord of hair clippers on the left or right of my lower back. Bright light
transitions, like oncoming headlights, or any high beams pointed at me or my mirrors
just irritate me.

Coping with the clippers cord on my back took some time, I’ve
always been ticklish, but this sensation was unbearable, what I found allowed
my barber or my dad to be able to effectively cut my hair was gripping my
throat quite firmly with my left hand, that sensation would distract the urge
to jump out of the chair just enough to get the haircut. My dad eventually
learned to try and avoid letting the cord touch me while the clippers were
running. It never occurred to me to tell him not to let that happen, it seemed
silly and unnecessary, and I couldn’t come up with the words to describe what I
wanted (not to happen). Today this sensation still drives me batty but what I
do now is cross both arms so I can squeeze both biceps with the opposing hands,
again the left gets the stronger grip, the seatback of the barber’s chair’s
with me as an adult makes this an incredibly brief experience, the barstool dad
used and the kiddie seat in the barbershop exposed my back to the vibrations of
cord of the running clippers for nearly the entire time.

Left-handed

Why the left hand? I don’t know, I’m a lefty turned ambidextrous,
I use my left hand only to write, hold a fork, eat one handed while driving, as
the primary hand in a two handed catch, poking things (like a touch screen), and
occasionally to operate a pair of ambidextrous scissors. I use the right hand
for everything else including operating ambidextrous scissors. When confronted
with a right favored tool like all the computer mice I grew up with things
curved such that they only work in the right hand I’ve adapted to feeling that’s
right or normal. I’d probably be a lefty mouse user if the old Microsoft mice
didn’t have that ridiculous lower curve on them, I occasionally mouse with my
left hand now though, usually this will happen when I’ve filled my right hand (food
or a book etc.) or when using a mouse on someone else’s computer that they’ve configured
in lefty mode, or just set on that side of the desk.

Journal

I’ve kept journals (the diary type) before but like many
Aspies I can fall into some deep depressions occasionally and these got really
dark so I stopped. The very first one was abandoned because it was in an actual
paper journal, and I’m not a hand written person, thanks to my poor and labored
penmanship. (Stupid computer converted my British spelling of Laboured to US
style.) There’s another common Aspie trait, we often pronounce or spell words
the way we remember first encountering. Dr. Tony Attwood explains this is why
many British and Australian Aspies speak with an American accent despite the
rest of their family speaking with a local accent.

I do adopt a local accent to better fit in, and it does
shift very quickly when I travel, I currently have a mild southern accent but I
often get remarks asking where I’m from because it must not be very good. The
person asking always says no it sounds southern just not local to where we happen
to be. I drop it as quickly as I can when I can take on a northern or western
accent as those are how I prefer to pronounce my words, but it takes a few days
for the dialect to shift. I really enjoy British and Australian accents and
phrases, I’ve never had the opportunity to see how those come out for me to see
if they’d stick around for a bit when I finish traveling. This isn’t done to be
fake or even on purpose; it’s something I don’t even realize I’m doing until
someone points it out. (There’s another tangent for you :) )

Fitness

I have been hovering between 152-181 lbs.; bodyweight, 150.5
and 184 were both touched for a day each. My daily exercise preference has been
to basically try to match calories burned to calories eaten; obviously more of
the former is preferred. This morning I picked up a workout routine that I
tried back in 2009, I came across it while putting some clothes up from winter
(go figure that it’d be 38 degrees F this morning after hitting 90 earlier this
month).

This trainer believes long workouts will never get done by normal
people, and that loads of cardio are for girls and that you get resistant to it
like a bad drug needing more and more to achieve the same effect.

So the scale this morning read 170.6 with 19% body fat and
55.5% body water content, which is good, it has been 171-174 and 18-22% fat,
for the past two or so months, body water content is always 55.x-58%. I think
the extremely stable water percentage is due to the fact that I weigh right out
of the shower, but this really doesn’t concern me drinking fluids is not a
problem, 170.x pounds has been seen occasionally.

This morning’s routine consisted of three sets of speed-jacks,
the wall sit x3, and three sets of the bird dog. This worked up a mild sweat
even though the air had a slight chill this morning. (The air inside as the air
handler was idled thanks to the mild evening temperature.)

Food Log (updated throughout the day)

Today I was late leaving the house so I couldn’t have my
bowl of oatmeal at home, and it was too late to make it at work without feeling
like I was taking advantage of the situation. So I had an egg & cheese
bagel at McDonald’s, reminding me why I always order this item without the “breakfast
sauce”, that and once again setting me to wondering why they have such a hard
time not burning the bagel. The bagel was washed down with a medium orange
juice.

Update 20:11: Taco Bell Taco Locos - sub beans for the beef, add tomatoes (i'm not a fan of sour cream particularly not on these tacos, with the waythey gob it on), Small Pepsi, and another chocolate chip granola bar, organic with dark chocolate this time.

Kacey Green
This post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.

I was diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder) as a child;
I think today all of these are classified as ADHD (attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder). A pair of my mentors in high school (perhaps it was
Junior High, my family was military and we moved quite a bit), Rich Phillips
and Hunter Matheson, noticed that I’d often take a conversation to places that
were only thinly related to the existing conversational thread, sometimes he
could see why I veered off in a certain direction, and sometimes only I could
follow the connections.

It was really more of a loving jab as many nicknames are,
not meant to cause harm, more of an inside joke with them and myself. They also
used it as a bit of a code word when in the company of someone who didn’t know
how I operate, “*cough* TANGENT *cough*”, as a prompt to watch my conversational
threads.

I do want to thank you two for taking time out of your day
several times a week to help me process things and to talk shop. Go figure that
a kid with a special interest in computers would take a liking to a pair of
network engineers huh?

Kacey GreenThis post brought to you from deep within the thought-stream of Tangent.

I watched the documentary "Loving Lampposts" today, I felt that it was well done and it showed a mix of high and low functioning adults and children on the Autism spectrum, it also questioned the use of those labels. They showed a fair argument from the anti-vaccine crowd and explained where they are coming from without calling them crazy, it also explains quite clearly that the main piece of documentation these people use other than their own personal experiences (study samples not controlled and way too small) has been refuted and many of the authors of that paper have retracted it.

They touched on some Autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s Syndrome and PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified).

They also did a great job questioning the intense dread the public has about people on the Autism Spectrum, the media has successfully married the word Autism to some of the more extreme cases of classic Autism, characterized it as an epidemic and made people feel fearful they've done something wrong if they end up having a child on the spectrum.

I think that I may be on the spectrum, I've been studying the disorder since early this year, and the descriptions of Asperger’s syndrome fit me like a glove. Obviously I'm not some creepy movie character that exhibits every possible symptom at the same time, some don't seem to apply to me at all (or at least not anymore now that I'm older). I think I'll go and see a specialist about a diagnosis this year, I spent up my whole childhood and early young adult life knowing I was different and not knowing why, having a label for this thing won't change anything but it will give me peace of mind, and light up a bit of a roadmap of what kind of coping strategies might help me lead a more fulfilled life.

My studies have already highlighted several of my strengths and weaknesses, I've begun to capitalize on the strengths and use strategies I learned growing up and that were pointed out during the studying to help minimize the negative effects or to better explain to someone just how I process specific stimuli. Even if I don't meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis, there's no denying I've got enough of a touch of this that some of these resources and strategies apply to me directly.

These people aren’t broken, I’m not broken, we’re different, and having different thought processes may allow us to come up with solutions that nobody has brought fourth yet.

I still like writing here way better than the likes of Facebook, Google+, or Twitter, so I think I may just post links back here when I want to share something.

I bought a 2012 Chevrolet Volt, this is the closest I could get to my grade-school dream of buying/leasing a GM EV1, I remember telling my mother once that I was going to get an EV1, she didn't doubt me or discourage me, my personality is sometimes incredibly driven, she figured if I meant it I'd do it. Well GM crushed the EV1s and terminated the program, but back in January I bought the closest thing that vehicle had to a successor. I've owned 3 hybrids an '04 Toyota Prius, an '09 & '12 Honda Civic Hybrid. This Volt is the closest thing to a pure EV, and has none of the compromises of one, though it does have most of the compromises of hybrids. It needs an oil change every two years, and you need to fill it with gasoline.

The benefits outweigh the two negatives, I would love longer all electric range, but for my daily commute it works perfectly, I go ~84 miles round trip each day, rarely using gas, but I also don't need to figure out alternative transportation when I need to leave my EV range. I hope this vehicle has a successor when I'm ready for my next car.

I've got 5277 all electric miles on it now out of a total of 5661, and I've only burned 9.2 gallons of gas.

My day job is now Internet & Business Development Manager Jones Chevrolet, I love working with this family, and my coworkers, they're awesome.

I don't think I mentioned it but my software development efforts are being funneled into my new company GSxtream, I launched this last year with Brad Stokes, right now I'm running it by myself and just re-did the logo

I'm working on a few projects under GSxtream with a few friends and I'm excited to share them with you, but the projects aren't ready to share with the world yet. We look forward to showing these programs off when they're ready.Kacey Green